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While Thom Hartmann likes to do his The Good, The Bad and The Ugly schtick on his shows, I have a “Very Good” that happened last week. The Supreme Court unnamimously sided with a property owner in a case of the EPA interferring with property rights. The case was Sackett v. EPA, and the EPA was publicly bitch-slapped by the SCOTUS. The EPA was trying to prevent a guy and his wife from building their dream home on property the couple owned. It seems the EPA was labeling the land as wetlands, but, in the video I saw, it was like trying to say the rivers that once existed on Mars still have wetlands.

This was a victory for personal liberty and economic freedom and is a good reason to celebrate on this first weekend of Spring!

Rep. Ryan’s budget is a reprise of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, where teachers and other public workers voluntarily gave up $128 million of benefits to help balance the state budget only to see Gov. Walker turn right around and hand $117 million of new tax breaks to wealthy business owners. You just can’t trust Republicans and anyone who negotiates with them is a fool.

@1 “The Supreme Court unnamimously sided with a property owner in a case of the EPA interferring with property rights. The case was Sackett v. EPA, and the EPA was publicly bitch-slapped by the SCOTUS.”

BULLSHIT ALERT: This is a gross misrepresentation; SCOTUS did no such thing. It simply ruled — in a unanimous opinion by signed both rightwing and moderate justices — that the Due Process Clause entitled the property owners to a pre-enforcement hearing. This decision is about the process, not the substance of whether EPA can regulate land use, and hardly plows new ground. In Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) SCOTUS ruled that welfare recipients were entitled to a hearing before being terminated from welfare. Sackett v. EPA merely extends this same principle to EPA’s administrative orders. The Sackett decision says nothing about whether the Sacketts broke the law or can build a house on their lot. That will be decided by a lower court in a future hearing.

America now imports 45%, down from 60%, of its oil due to a combination of increased production and lower consumption. This interesting article talks about how changing energy dynamics could sharply alter our foreign policy, and also discusses the environmental angles.

Just since 2007, consumption of all liquid fuels in the United States, including diesel, jet fuel and heating oil, has dropped by about 9 percent, according to the Energy Department. Gasoline use fell 6 to 12 percent, estimated Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service.

Although Southern California’s love affair with muscle cars and the open road persists, driving habits have changed in subtle but important ways.

Take Tory Girten, who works as an emergency medical technician and part-time lifeguard in the San Diego area. He switched from driving a Ford minivan to a decidedly smaller and more fuel-efficient Dodge Caliber. Fed up with high gasoline prices, he also moved twice recently to be closer to the city center, cutting his daily commute considerably — a hint of the shift taking place in certain metropolitan areas as city centers become more popular while growth in far-out suburbs slows.

“I would rather pay a little more monthly for rent than for just filling up my tank with gas,” he said, after pulling into a local gas station to fill up.”

Sorry Bob – people do adjust in various ways to higher fuel prices. However, global demand still remains strong. If we don’t use the stuff they’re drilling out – someone else, (China, Japan, Brazil, India) will..

@3, @5 Thank you, Roger. When I read the first post, my instinct was “This is bullshit” – with the high-fiving and “bitch-slap” comments about environmental regulation. Thanks for setting the record straight.

PI, why not head over to SoundPolitics and spread your santorum over there?

It completely blows my mind how easily the TeaBaggers will lie to themselves and to everyone within earshot about such basic, and easily verifiable information.

Its the cult of The Lie, that entirely artificial psychological construct that enables people to dismiss real, relevant and often extremely important information in favor of flat out denying that a problem or an important situation exists. They hide it from themselves, willingly. But they still must be trained from birth to accept The Lie.

I wonder how much of that attitude can be traced through a highly developed system of brainwashing, inflicted self-hypnosis and that atavistic self-hatred that encompasses the Pentecostals and other Evilangelists and the hard core Imams. There are Orthodox Jews in Israel that are attacking women not wearing traditional head scarves or covering their heads in some way. Beating them up. There are Christians that are murdering physicians in front of their children. There are entire neighborhoods being put to the torch in the Middle East. There are entire communities all over the world that dedicate themselves to The Lie. It could be economic, or political, or religious. But it is still The Lie.

I still think it would be a great amendment to the Constitution to have the states’ legislatures have the power to overule any federal government action if 2/3 or more of those legislatures decide that the federal government’s action is invalid. That is, if some dumbass president wants to get us into another war without a delcaration of war from Congress, that state legislatures could simply vote to negate the president’s war actions. Or, if some agency like the DEA is acting like a bunch of thiugs, the state legislatures could simply vote the DEA out of existence.

Any time the government loses in court, it’s good for Corporate freedom and capitalist individual liberty.

FTFY

The Government is supposed to represent YOU. If you allow criminals into government, all you get is a ruling party that makes their crimes legal or just ignores the law entirely. There are far too many Corporatist types getting into Government. I would say probably 95% of Congress. The EPA has long since been compromised by Corporatist interests. You cannot complain about the Government behaving like a criminal organization, when the only people you vote for are the criminals.The people that Corporations always seem to be supporting no matter how slimy those people are in other ways.

Corporations are not people. They should have never ever been allowed to attain the same privileges and rights as humans. You get rid of the EPA like the TeaBaggers so dearly want to do, and you can say goodbye to that pure water you pump out of your own land. You can say goodbye to the songbirds and the trees in your neighborhood. You can say hello to your descendants struggles with asthma and weakened hearts from breathing the crap that factories dump into the air.

Because the only semblance of a Police Department that keeps air and water clean will be gone. The only Government body in charge of taking your complaints about your neighbors or the factory down the road for wrecking your well, or your foundation or your yard. There will always be people who just don’t give a damn what they do. They dump their motor oil in the drain in the street. They’ll flush their old painting chemicals down the stream that passes by your yard or goes through it. They’ll bury gigantic amounts of lethal chemicals in open pits and then conveniently “forget” where the pits are when they sell the land off to a housing developer or a City to build a school on.

There must be a Police Department of some sort to force those people to stop by any means necessary.

You just keep licking those boots pal. It’ll Trickle Down on you, someday.

Any time the government loses in court, it’s good for freedom and individual liberty.

What horseshit.

The government is us. Don’t like it – get involved and change it. But this absurd notion that the government is other, and inherently bad, is corrosive and underlies and is essential to the right’s further tilting of the playing field toward the oligarchy.

Not all glibertarians are racists, but their poorly thought out, ie Randian, analysis and policy positions certainly play into the hands of either the out-and-out sheet-wearing yahoos from Bubbastan, or the market-worshiping, magic fairy dust of austerity corporatists.

@11 “Any time the government loses in court, it’s good for freedom and individual liberty.”

Would you like to argue that also applies to the prosecutorial misconduct that spared Bill Ayers from a prison sentence for his terrorist activities? Is bombing public buildings as a form of protest your idea of “freedom and individual liberty”?

“A Montana man was arrested after he tried to bring four loaded guns through a security checkpoint at a Sacramento, California, airport … Waller was carrying a loaded handgun and had three loaded firearms in his carry-on bags … deputies searched his car at an off-site parking lot and turned up eight more firearms, several of them loaded.”

So, what we have here is the George Zimmerman of air travel? I can see this guy leaping up from his seat in mid-flight because he spots some “middle eastern-looking guy” walking down the aisle to use the lavatory and POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! a bunch of holes in the fuselage and various passengers. We don’t need no goatfucking George Zimmerman types on airplanes, imho.

Government is the one venue where we all have an equal say, in theory, and if we participate.

This is terrifying to the oligarchists and theocrats, and the adolescent glibertarians.

Hence the efforts to buy government, and subvert voting rights, and to disaffect people, make them cynical, and convince them to hate government. They want government to be seen as evil other, rather than the ordinary person’s most potent tool for improving their lot in life.

That is why all these ‘small government/shrink the government’ yahoos all want government jobs, despite their protests about hating government and drowning it in a bathtub.

The goal is to de-link the fact that power is vested in the people, with the fact that government is the tool the people control and with which they define the type of society that they desire.

Fool people into thinking that government, and unions for that matter, are the big organized bullies ruining their lives, and not the corporations and small slice of wealthy that are parasitizing society and robbing them of the fruits of their labor – that’s the big prize and they are a long way toward achieving that goal.

What can the president control? This year, Republicans are saying Obama has not done enough to promote domestic drilling, but the U.S. drilling-rig count is twice as high now as it was in 2009. With the exception of a spike in 2008, the current rig count is higher than any year since the early 1980s, according to figures compiled by WTRG Economics.

“Dick Cheney was recovering Saturday at a Virginia hospital after receiving a heart transplant, his office said. Cheney was in the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church …. Cheney … has been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months.”

A 32-year-old Iraqi woman was beaten nearly to death with a tire iron in her San Diego home. Police found a note near the unconscious woman that said, “Go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.” Her father and husband are contractors who train U.S. troops heading for Iraq.

Tough-oil reserves like these will provide most of the world’s new oil in the years ahead. One thing is clear: even if they can replace easy oil in our lives, the cost of everything oil-related — whether at the gas pump, in oil-based products, in fertilizers, in just about every nook and cranny of our lives — is going to rise. Get used to it. If things proceed as presently planned, we will be in hock to big oil for decades to come.…

So yes, there is oil out there. But no, it won’t get cheaper, no matter how much there is. And yes, the oil companies can get it, but looked at realistically, who would want it?

An interesting contrast, a black football player is arrested for killing a dog, but nobody is arrested for killing a black kid. And my point, for the ones who don’t make obvious connections: Why the double standard and why are there people still defending the man and the process?

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